


paradero de memoria

by elebuu



Category: Final Fantasy XIV, Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Sommerset LARP
Genre: Ask Me Anything, Female Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Gen, HEAVY 5.3 spoilers, Hyur (Final Fantasy XIV), Jura Fontaine - Freeform, OC shit, Patch 5.3: Reflections in Crystal Spoilers, cross-cosmic wol, go then there are other worlds than these, grown-up magical girl oc, i will tell you believe me, i wrote this by accident on twitter, im sorry, im sry this depends a lot on oc Deep Lore, undead oc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:14:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26538670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elebuu/pseuds/elebuu
Summary: she is Death;but not for you, gunslinger.(a musing on bringing other worlds to this one.)
Relationships: Elidibus & Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Kudos: 15





	paradero de memoria

_Much to the foiled expectations of the soul-drowsy Elidibus, within the heart of the Crystal Tower, she appears. Jura Fontaine, the would-be Warrior of Light to these people and this place._

_But she is unrecognisable. She is plain._

_She is human._

_In his dead memories she has always had that deep black hair, complexion as hollow-pale as weak opal, has always had that blemish stain above her brow._

_Here she is standing, leaning on a black jointed cane, in plain but bizarre clothing, and without her eerie visage._

_She looks as weak as any easily discarded mortal. But it's the same gaze. Sundering stripped her of her true glory, but it did not take her eyes._

_Jura Fontaine, her living flesh gifted back its blood and pigment, her hair dun and brown, her brows blank._

_So banished is her specter as much as his, at the spire of this beacon tower that's repeated shard and shard over. She seems, as does he, a younger creature, possessed of a kind of cursed innocence. It's as she was before either of their sacrifices._

_"I'm sorry._

_I was selfish._

_I gave up what you did, but it was a tiny soul for an equally tiny wish."_

_She smiles and he tastes the bitterness of it._

_"Back then, in that world, none of us had the power to make miracles._

_...but you...?"_

_Elidibus tilts his head, shaking loose more of the aetherdust of his greatest persona. They've both forgotten so much._

_Why would she say this now? Now, after all has been wagered, the feather of his heart weighed?_

_But she only adjusts her grip on the beak of her implement._

_"I wish I remembered more. I know I would have more to say to you. All I know is that if we were different people, back then, I'm sure I would never have let this befall you."_

_Her sore eyelids crease, looking away._

_"But I know without remembering that I did."_

_He regards this weak creature, marveled and embarrassed in turn that it was she, it was this, that defeated him._

_It's then that he understands how--and why._

_Death dripped from her hands and rendered her barely visible._

_But those awful eyes._

_He saw they wished for kinship._

_And he saw that they were dead._

_This hollow being that the world had made up into its hero--this creature who had become seafoam before, and mayhap would again, be it by his hand or not._

_Why... why did Emet-Selch deem those eyes worthy?_

_The glassy texture forming over them told him she'd asked the same, once._

_"I'm... I'm so sorry. You were right. I think you nearly always were._

_I *am* Death._

_I didn't want to be," she murmured, as that younger, former self bled away into the pale creature he'd met in the company of Minfilia, his equal, his other._

_And there stood the only surviving silhouette of the defector._

_Azem._

_Bearing her mighty, horrible, mournful crook. As violet as the sky her former seat had been capable of singing to._

_Behind spectacles, her eyes were glassy, full of undertow._

_"Don't worry," she said, softly. "I'm not going to send you to your death."_

_They both looked to the handfuls of singing stones, wellsprings of aching memory._

_"...A friend of mine once thought this place a kind of tomb for himself. And he went there, willingly..."_

_His form stood on unsteady knees, the remnants of anger licking at the back of his mind. But he was listening, nonetheless, for she was not yet finished with her soliloquy._

_"My friend slept here with a full heart, because he knew that were he to wake, it would be to a deserving future..."_

_She looked askance, away, and then to his eyes, her grip shifting on her shepherd's grandstaff._

_"Would... would you like to do the same?"_

_Elidibus--his original name blurry and having bled down the face of history like chalk drawings in rain--regarded his embraceful of precious words and memories. A future? Would there really be a future beyond the dominance of the past...?_

_Would it be worthy of that?_

_"...At duty's end, we meet again," his ageless voice recited, again._

_A dose, somewhere, of what Emet-Selch must have seen, into which he had placed his crumbled hopes._

_"...A worthy future, is it?", he asked the bringer of death, the ferrier of souls._

_Almost tearfully, the debutante Warrior of Light smiled as warmly and sweetly as he had ever, ever seen, destroyed memories notwithstanding._

_"Yes. Yes, my new old friend._

_I will spend this chance; this life; laying it down for you. For everyone that I can, if I can."_

_At that, his heavy eyelids, behind their sorrowful crimson crown, blinked and wavered._

_"How long...?"_

_She shook her head slowly, shrugging ruefully._

_"As long as it takes."_

_He tightened his arms around the warmth of his myriad siblings' memories, reflected in crystal._

_In spite of himself, Elidibus chuckled, a little dryly. His true voice was long unused._

_"...See that you do._

_And perhaps, after that, I shall meet you, too."_

_Jura knelt at the base of her grandstaff, and carried the Emissary to his fairy-tale slumber._

_'Someday._

_Someday I will call you by your names, your deaths in the palm of my hands.'_

_Such strong souls weighed through to breaking her palms, wages and coins of her living-dead, dread magic._

_She waited on the precipice, a friend's soul gem in hand, and stood and waited and waited until she saw the smile of good dreams on the former Ascian's lips._

_'O God,' she invoked, an alien deity's prayer, 'I want to do this right.'_

_She squeezed her weapon tightly, then let it dissolve into the creek of water it was made to become._

_'For all of you. I don't want to live in a world where strange souls must die._

_So dream now._

_Of a better tomorrow._

_Dark or otherwise._

_I promise.'_

_The gates of the Crystal Tower closed around their new prodigal son;_

_not with a bang, but with a whisper._

_The gwyllion turned to leave, and she stepped softly, so as not to waken him too soon._

_This world wasn't ready yet--but it would be._


End file.
